You were not getting excited over nothing; if you can figure out how to download steam, how to purchase a game with it, and how to open and play it, installing a mod isn’t that much harder. Download some files, put them in the right folder, open the game.
Also, to piggyback onto your comment. Stardew valley without mods is still a very enjoyable game. I had about 300 hours in the game before I installed my first mod. There’s a lot of great quality of life ones, but out of the box it’s still phenomenal.
Oh I know Stardew Valley is still enjoyable, I bought it years ago and then I even bought the book/guide for it and I probably have played the equivalent of what you’ve played, I’m sure I’m well into 300 hours by now. But, it does get stale, and repetitive - it does make one wish for more game content, even with the update that brought the “golden walnuts” island expansion to it.
Well there’s the problem. I tried downloading Steam, of course it didn’t work because some extension or other had to first be installed on this computer. So I installed the extension, now it says it can’t open. I did get it open once, but the game I downloaded never worked at all. Steam doesn’t work on every computer, I guess.
But my main game system is the Switch (right now), I don’t even use the computer. And it “steams” me because there are SOOO many great looking casual games on Steam I wish I could play!!!